What's Next? A Review

The Kate Chronicles has completed over 52 weeks of micro “memoirable” essays. It has offered me a platform and a place. And you, my dear readers, fundamentally altering the trajectory of my career.

Through annual cycles, I’ve gone to a class every Wednesday run by the inimitable, Ellen Meister. When the pandemic shut us down in person, we moved to Zoom. I found my people there and am thrilled not to have to give them up, even though I’ve moved a few hundred miles away to start on a new adventure.

For years now, I’ve workshopped a succubus of a novel that needs some shaping.  I haven’t been able to muster the gumption to do the rewrite it deserves, though the concept is brilliant and still whispers in my ear. But of course, it’s just like me to stop sculpting David right around the waist.

I built a life for myself that revolved around my kids and my husband, mistaking it for an either/or proposition. Which it isn’t. While I said I was a writer, few people in my day-to-day got to read anything I’d written beyond an early novel and a few short stories. No one denies I talk a good line of shit, but could I write it?

I hated the book and myself, though as with everything I have stuck to for at least 500 pages, I was too far in to turn back. The other side of my world, the one I’d dismantled purposely, dragging my husband to the friendlier wilds of western Massachusetts, was at a crucial tipping point. Had shaking it all up been enough to stave off the sadness of my empty nest?

I put the novel aside as I was invited to join a workshop that approached things a bit differently. My original group is not up for negotiation. The camaraderie and leadership I’ve found there is first-rate. 

But this new one was an opportunity to explore, and I’m nothing if not a sucker for an expanding horizon. This group of people and this workshop turned out to be all the reasons I’d chosen this spot to escape to in the first place. 

The format is this: We write for the first half hour and read what we’ve come up with. Nothing groundbreaking there, but here’s the kicker: We only offer positive feedback. We just want to know, “what’s working?” 

At first I was stumped, my mind moving like a heat guided missile to “better constructs” and the flaws of not only my own work, but everyone else’s. I soaked up the positive ethos quickly. What blindsided me was the way the new scope on my editorial rifle altered my aim. 

Freedom from fear of criticism, both finding and receiving, gave me a different view of my surroundings. What resonated with them became a guidepost for me. Because when you’re forced to glide over the negative crumbs to zero in on the occasional chocolate chip, you’ll find more of them, not fewer.

I’ve read my stuff aloud to small groups before, and various, less friendly workshops. Finding the right writers is a heady business—everyone is there for the unattainable goal of skyrocketing to the top of some list. Or becoming Uncle Stevie—King that is, not Van Zandt or Ray Vaughan. Or my actual Uncle Steve, who currently plays the piano for the silent movies at the Film Forum in downtown Manhattan. And who, upon reading a few of my “Chronicles,” welcomed me into the generational pantheon of familial entertainers, including my long gone, but wildly talented playwright of a father. An opportunity for validation that proved worth any risk.

Writing is my self contained universe. At different points of any day, I am a surprised reader, a conniving plotter, and my own chief critic. I began this journey nervous but excited. People might enjoy my hard won, offbeat take on this world, and writing is so much cheaper than therapy. I prepared for take off, harboring a secret hope for flight.

With encouragement, I took my best faux confidence and began the Kate Chronicles. I closed my eyes and put the first few stories out on Medium before migrating to Substack. Instead of a mediocre stay-at-home mom, who successfully thwarted my own dreams, the world might see that I was never really that good in the first place. In other words, I was scared. But as I was telling my friend this year later, each Friday feels less like a self enforced public disrobing, and more like a chance to visit with friends. 

There is an ever widening pool of educated, capable writers and AI breathing down all of our necks. There was once one route to “success” for writers like me and it came through several publishing houses. And then they merged. And then they gave open slots to their friends. And then they put up more fences to climb over, and gave out graduate degrees, and forced you to be or pay your own editor and marketer to boot. Traditional publishing is gate kept by evermore frustrated grad students, with fewer print or online big boys to publish with. 

It would take me months, possibly years to attempt to get any of the Kate Chronicle pieces published in a literary magazine, let alone the Harvard of short story, the New Yorker. Work is fungible and eyeballs are everything. I’ve wasted enough time ruminating on my thin skin to throw more months in, just to see if they will validate me.

I try not to be one to double down on a losing strategy. Assuming I recognize it. Which, as you’ve seen, can take me a really long time. I made my own course. The dance is a featured solo regardless of the stage.

With a stone thrown into a vast pool, I hoped for good ripples. It was better than I imagined. I dumped my skeletons in metaphor on a page, which is, after all, the only way I ever feel heard. It has been a moving surprise to know that inside the Kate Chronicles, many of you have felt heard too.

Each like or comment, each phone call or email, finally validated my entire existence in a way 1,000 reviewers or my kids, couldn’t. Really shouldn’t. With shaky steps I lay witness to the transition all around and inside me. And you, my dear readers, have been nice enough to join.

All of this is to say, thanks. In this year or so weeks of posts, besides being part therapist, part audience, you’ve given me connection and all the validation I’ve been waiting for.

Biggest bonus? No one says to me, “Oh, are you still working on that book?”